Educationalist Peter Scott says that Higher Education, with the compulsive need to be always near the top of the table, is not like the Premier league, but "...treating higher education as if it were a game, corrupts. A good “student experience”, now an obligatory phrase, is not increased or diminished simply because it is ranked higher or lower in some crazy table. The real value of science and scholarship cannot be measured by whether those who undertake the underlying research have had lots of external grants (the bigger the better) or get published in highly cited journals or by top-flight university presses.

Peter Scott is professor of higher education studies at the UCL Institute of Education and currently ranked 11th best UK university.

Vince Cable, the UK Coalition Government's Business Secretary said: "I just want to make absolutely clear, as far as the government is concerned we have no cap on the number of overseas students, we don't propose to introduce one." New figures show that in 2012 190,000 people arrived in Britain to study in the UK. In 2011 overseas students were 246,000.

Labour's education policy in a sentence:
"The key to good education, whatever the sign outside the school says, is the quality of teaching and leadership inside it and, therefore, we shall focus on how we can raise the status of the teaching profession." Shadow Education Secretary, Stephen Twigg

"We have colleagues working in some of the most dangerous parts of the world. What worries me is that if you are a bona fide researcher from the LSE, you now face the risk of not being trusted, or of harbouring journalists." London School of Economics